Bilingual Insights into the Initial Lexicon

The Role of Cognates in Word Acquisition

Gonzalo Garcia-Castro

PhD Defence / Departament de Medicina i Ciències de la Vida

2024-11-03

Average English-native 20-year-old knows ~42,000 words: mental lexicon

Lexical representations
Phonological, conceptual, grammatical information of known words

Overview

  • Introduction:
  • From speech sounds to words
  • Bilingualism and its challenges
  • The role of phonology (cognateness)
  • Study 1: AMBLA model, acquisition of cognates, role of language exposure
  • Study 2: language non-selectivity in the initial bilingual lexicon
  • Discussion

The initial lexicon

  1. From sounds to lexical representations
  2. Vocabulary spurt
  3. Early dynamics of lexical processing

From sounds to lexical representations

From sounds to lexical representations

Lexical representation: (at least) form-meaning association


Parental reports

e.g., MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) (Fenson et al. 1994)

Vocabulary growth

Vocabulary size grows non-linearly during the second year of life

Figure 1: Vocabulary size norms for 51,800 monolingual children learning 35 distinct languages (wordbank)

Early dynamics of lexical processing

Cascaded activation: activation spreads across non-selected lexical representations (Allopenna, Magnuson, and Tanenhaus 1998)

Early dynamics of lexical processing

In children (Chow, Davies, and Plunkett 2017)

The bilingual lexicon

Challenges a bilingual environment

Bilingual words acquisition

Cognateness

Language non-selectivity

Challenges a bilingual environment

Increased complexity in linguistic context:

Two grammatical systems, two phoneme inventories, two sets of word-forms

Reduced linguistic input

Split into two languages

Increased referential ambiguity

2 labels, 1 referent

Bilingual word acquisition

Bilinguals acquire words at similar rates as monolinguals (Hoff et al. 2012)

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Lexically closer languages ➡️ Larger vocabulary size (Floccia et al. 2018)

English-Dutch > English-Mandarin

Cognate: form-similar translation equivalents (TEs)

Cognate Non-cognate
[cat] /ˈgat-ˈgato/ [dog] /ˈgos-ˈpe.ro/

Cognates acquired earlier than non-cognates (Mitchell, Tsui, and Byers-Heinlein 2023; Bosch and Ramon-Casas 2014)

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Figure 2: Pairwise lexical similarity

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Figure 3: Aggregated vocabularies might conceal facilitation effects

What mechanisms support a cognate facilitation during word acquisition?

Language non-selective lexical access

Language non-selectivity

Activation spreads across non-selected representations in both languages, through phonological and conceptual links. (e.g., Costa, Caramazza, and Sebastian-Galles 2000)

Language non-selectiviy

Study 1

Cognate beginnings to lexical acquisition

Introduction

Bilinguals keep up with monolinguals in vocabulary growth

The presence of cognates seems to facilitate vocabulary acquisition

Language co-activation has been suggested to underlie this phenomenon

What mechanisms are support the role of co-activation in cognate acquisition?

The AMBLA model

Accumulator Model of Bilingual Lexical Acquisition

  1. Infants accumulate information about word-forms until a threshold is reached and the word is acquired

Information is provided in the form of word effective learning instances (ELI).


Effective learning instance
Exposure to a word-form that results in the accumulation of information about its meaning

\[ \begin{aligned} \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c\}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \\ \textbf{where:} \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \\ c &= 300 \end{aligned} \\ \]

\[ \begin{aligned} \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c\}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \cdot \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Exposure}_{ij}} \\ \textbf{where:} \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \\ c &= 300 \\ \end{aligned} \]

  1. Words accumulate additional information from the co-activation of their (phonologically similar) translation equivalent

Learning instances for one word-form may result in the accumulation of information for its translation equivalent

Degree of income additional information proportional to the phonological similarity between both translation equivalents

\[ \begin{aligned} \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c\}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \cdot \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Exposure}_{ij}} \cdot \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Cognateness}_{j}}\\ \textbf{where:} \\ \text{Frequency}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \\ c &= 300 \\ \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Cognateness}_{j}} = &\color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Levenshtein}(j, j')} \end{aligned} \\ \]

Methods

Barcelona Vocabulary Questionnaire (BVQ)

Participants

Data processing

Modelling approach and statistical inference

Results

Regression coefficients

Figure 4: Posterior distribution of fixed regression coefficients

Marginal effects

Figure 5: Posterior marginal effects

Discussion

Study 2

Developmental trajectories of bilingual spoken word recognition

Introduction

Methods

Participants

Stimuli

Design

Procedure

Results

Discussion

Thanks

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